Review: The Cypress House blends genres

Michael Koryta will discuss and read from The Cypress House, 6:30 p.m. Feb. 7 at Murder By The Book, 2342 Bissonnet; 713-524-8597.

THE CYPRESS HOUSE

By Michael Koryta.

Little, Brown, 432 pp., $24.99.

Reviewed by P.G. Koch

There is an otherworldly quality to the Depression-era South in Michael Koryta’s The Cypress House, and not just because the hero, Arlen Wagner, knows when people are going to die — they turn into skeletons and their eyes start to smoke. That’s creepy enough. But the depiction of Florida’s panhandle, an overgrown backwoods years before developers arrived, and the isolated inn on the Gulf Coast beach where Arlen ends up with young Civilian Conservation Corps co-worker Paul Brickhill, are equally eerie.

This is the type of economically ruined community where criminal enterprises infiltrate, here replacing the local sheriff and judge with their own players. The shadow of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op definitely hovers at Arlen’s shoulder, but the gothic edges out the noir, ramped up in no small part by the presence of the alluring and stoical Rebecca Cady, owner of the inn.

Deftly blending all genres, Koryta balances the scary violence of Judge Solomon Ward and his tame sheriff — a nightmare of despotic small-town lawmen peculiar to a later South — with the sexual currents stirred up among the three people effectively trapped in the house: Arlen, the romantic, love-besotted Paul, and Rebecca, with her layers upon layers of secrets.

Lies are the bywords here. Arlen’s plan to extract the others from their seemingly hopeless situation founders repeatedly on this universal mistrust, the agonizing plot twists presaging a finale where Koryta demonstrates his skill at intense action. However counterintuitive, he makes this curious mix of supernatural prescience and gothic-noir work with a seamless atmospheric certainty.